RealClearPolitics has text of an interview Fox Business Network did with a former intelligence officer, and they characterize her comments as “Biden is turning Ukraine into another Afghanistan.” The gist of that conclusion is that Ukraine is a quagmire like the one Biden declared in Afghanistan before precipitously pulling out our relatively few remaining troops and leaving billions in equipment behind.
I’d like to suggest an alternative conclusion, also involving Afghanistan. I think the better analogy is when the U.S. armed Afghan jihadis to drive the Soviet Russians out of their high-altitude opium patch. In that case, as in Ukraine today, it was locals and Russians doing all the killing and dying, with us supplying the arms.
The general consensus about that earlier involvement in Afghanistan is that we won, Russia-as-Soviets lost and went home. Who is to say we won’t achieve the same outcome if we stay the course in Ukraine?
If the intelligence officer wanted to argue against inserting U.S. troops as we later did in Afghanistan, I’d completely agree. Our record with arming locals to drive out Russians is actually pretty good.
Of course arming locals in an ongoing dispute can make local enemies too, as we’ve learned in arming Kurds in Syria and Iraq. Turkish President Erdogan is now being a pain because of it, he considers Kurds a fungus to be eradicated.
